MUMBAI: Besides being
bested on its numbers by larger rival TCS, India's No. 2 software
exporter, Infosys also appears to be losing the tag it perhaps covets
the most- that of being India's most admired IT brand.

Even as it struggles to re-invent itself to tackle resurgent rivals,
the Bangalore-based firm maybe losing out to India's largest firm-
until recently considered the least brandconscious of India's top
outsourcers.

For long, Infosys has consistently
been recognized as India's most admired IT Company by business
consultancies and media in India and abroad. It has, for instance, been
ranked as India's most admired company by Wall Street Journal Asia for
nine consecutive years.

"Infosys hasn't done what
it should have (financially and strategically) and this has affected
its brand," says Jessie Paul, Founder of Paul Writer, a strategic
marketing advisory, and former marketing chief for Wipro Technologies .
She adds that TCS' brand has also benefitted from being the largest
Indian information technology company.

"The number two and three players have suffered from confused strategies," she explains.

" TCS has muscled into the vacuum their missteps have created." Infosys
and TCS declined to comment. Deepak Khosla, sales and marketing head
for NIIT , thinks that financial performance is the biggest contributor to building a company's brand.

TCS is expected to grow the revenue gap between itself and Infosys to
nearly $3 billion by the end of this fiscal and its profits are growing
faster too. Infosys' revenues had nearly matched TCS around four years
ago, but the latter has since pulled away. "No branding is better than
strong financial performance," says Khosla.

D-street analysts believe that TCS is ready to usurp the hallowed
prefix that Infosys has owned for nearly two decades: bellwether. "Till
about a year ago, Infosys used to be the benchmark for IT. But ever
since TCS started outperforming Infosys regularly, we look to TCS as
the leader of the pack," says Srishti Anand, IT research analyst Angel
Broking.

INFY LOSES STEAM

Infosys, which was once the benchmark employer for thousands of wannabe
software engineers has fallen on that scale too, as attrition levels
have risen. For the last quarter, Infosys attrition was over 21% while
TCS was just over 16%. "Infosys doesn't enjoy the same premium on
campus or among lateral hires anymore," says the CEO of a HR
consultancy in Bangalore, who requested anonymity.

Some marketers actually argue that TCS always had a fairly
lackadaisical approach to brand building and only its strong financial
performance alone may have helped its cause.

"The
contours for Brand TCS and Infosys are quite blurred," says R Sridhar,
a CEO and business coach and former chairman of OgilvyOne Worldwide ,
Mumbai. "Financial performance is not the only metric."

More intangible benefits such as innovation programmes need to be added
to the mix before deciding on TCS' rise (or Infosys' fall) in the brand
sweepstakes. YLR Moorthi, a professor of marketing at IIM , Bangalore,
thinks TCS has always had the edge over Infosys by being older and a
pioneer in the assembly line delivery of software code.

"But, Infosys has built a much stronger brand for years, despite being
a relatively smaller firm," he contends. Some of this brand heft may
have come from initiatives such as the InStep, a student internship
program at Infosys, which saw American students with near-perfect
academic scores eye an opportunity to work at its Bangalore campus and
interact with NR Narayana Murthy .

Over three
decades, Infosys has been at the vanguard of disclosures to investors
and analysts with the "when in doubt, disclose" dictum coined by
co-founder N R Narayana Murthy. Co-founder Nandan Nilekani has boosted
the company's image by quitting at the top, opting to kick-start and
help India's unique ID project now called Aadhar.

"When you want to create a bellwether, you need to have people who go
out there and talk- ...and over time they themselves become brands,"
says Anand Halve, co-founder of Chlorophyll, a brand consultancy. "As
these people like Nilekani and Pai have stepped away, the Infosys brand
which has been linked with these individuals has suffered," he adds.

REINVENTION OF TCS

TCS, on the other hand, has gone through a reinvention of sorts
starting with a restructuring exercise in 2008. TCS reorganised itself
along 23 independent business units, each of which has its own P&L
responsibilities - a move that helped TCS weather the recession better.

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